Umwa on Contract Work

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Now, despite reports that the employers have offered not to impose financial penalties on strikers, and to restore cost of living agreements, Miller still clearly feels unable to take the chance of recommending a new deal..

Some of the most bitter resistance to his first effort was from the executive board of District 29 in Miller's own home state of West Virginia.

The board, representing 24;500 members, called for Militant/Nancy Cole "The proposed penalty clause dealing with wildcat strikes is too restrictive ... the language concerning absenteeism is Vague and should be ciaritied . . . the proposed increase 111 wages and is not enough and the cost of living adjustment be eliminated st A similar stand was taken by UMW officials representing 16,000 miners in Ohio.

In Illinois official announced that rank and file response to Miller's proposea contract was "switt and uniformly negative"

Presidents and vice presidents of 23 Illinois locals sent a telegram to Miller saying:

. "This is to inform you that the rank and file miners in District 12 UMWA as local union officials feel that after reading the proposed agreement that you should resign immediately"

Shaken

Miller, who gained office on only 42% of the vote in a three-cornered fight, obviously shaken by the whole experience.

He has ordered the union's national headquarters in Washington to be closed down after angry miners pushed their way in to make clear their views on his contract.

Now reportedly carrying a gun for self-defence, he told reporters:

"The people who barged into the headquarters are the same right to strike bunch that caused last year"

It is the instability of the Miller bureaucracy that gives Carter his biggest headache in struggling to end this historic strike.

Though Miller himself would clearly accept anything, it is far from certain that an attempt to invoke the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act against the miners would effectively break an action in which gun-toting teams of pickets have been touring non-union mines.

Ignored

Mid West state governors have warned the President that a court injunction calling for a return to work for 80 days might well be ignored. Carter himself has remarked that the law has never been used successfully against the miners-who successfully defied the full weight of státe military repression to stage strikes at the height of the Second World War.

And any • attempt tc invoke the law against this basic layer of the US labou movement could severely damage the traditional collab oration . between unior bureaucrats and the capitalis Democratic Party.

This political question now stands as a central issue in the dispute.

With both Democrats and Republicans openly ranged against the miners, condition: are ideal for the call for the UMW and other unions to break from these capitalist parties and establish a Labo Party to represent the interests of US workers.

But this call is avoided by strike.

The "Trotskyists" of thi Socialist Workers Party hav

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the proposed contract to be rejected because:

virtually all the "socialist' elements active around thi